Identifying Related Information Given Content and/or Presenting Related Information in Association with Content-related Advertisements

ABSTRACT

The usefulness of content (target content), such as advertisements, may be increased by determining additional content and providing such additional content in association with the content. The target content may be text, a Web page, a URL, a search query, etc. The additional content might be related suggested queries (e.g. “Try a search for ______”), news articles (or excerpts or summaries thereof), reviews (or excerpts or summaries thereof), advertisements, user group messages, etc.

§ 0. RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application claims benefit to U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No.60/450,775, titled “IDENTIFYING RELATED INFORMATION GIVEN CONTENT AND/ORPRESENTING RELATED INFORMATION IN ASSOCIATION WITH CONTENT-RELATEDADVERTISEMENTS,” filed on Feb. 28, 2003, and listing Krishna Bharat andJeffrey A. Dean as the inventors. That application is expresslyincorporated herein by reference. The scope of the present invention isnot limited to any requirements of the specific embodiments in thatapplication.

§ 1. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION § 1.1 Field of the Invention

The present invention concerns determining additional content fromtarget content and may be used to increase the effectiveness ofadvertising, such as on-line advertising.

§ 1.2 Background Information

The Internet provides many with access to information of interest. Auser might request a document that may concern a topic of interest.Sometimes, however, the document might not turn out to have exactly whatthe user is looking for, or the user may desire to obtain additionalinformation on the topic. Hypertext links between documents that mayconcern the same or related topics allow users to navigate or “surf” theInternet in their quest for information on the topic of their interest.However, such links are typically embedded in the document by an authorof the document and may be relatively static. Accordingly, theusefulness of links often depends on the foresight and knowledge of theauthor. Accordingly, there is a need to help users to find content ofinterest.

Moreover, the Internet is often a useful conduit for companies to relayinformation about their products and services to potential customers.Therefore, there is a need for companies to put their information beforeusers. To do so, they must entice users to a particular Web page orWebsite. This will often not happen unless the user is motivated to doso. One way to motivate a user to go to a particular Web page or Websiteis via on-line ads. Normally, when a member of the advertising audience(referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the Specification without lossof generality) selects an ad by clicking on it, an embedded hypertextlink typically directs the viewer to the advertiser's Website. Thisprocess, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a“click-through” (“Click-through” is intended to cover any userselection.). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number ofimpressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed orotherwise rendered) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate”or “CTR” of the ad.

A “conversion” is said to occur when a user consummates a transactionrelated to a previously served ad. What constitutes a conversion mayvary from case to case and can be determined in a variety of ways. Forexample, it may be the case that a conversion occurs when a user clickson an ad, is referred to the advertiser's Web page, and consummates apurchase there before leaving that Web page. Alternatively, a conversionmay be defined as a user being shown an ad, and making a purchase on theadvertiser's Web page within a predetermined time (e.g., seven days). Inyet another alternative, a conversion may be defined by an advertiser tobe any measurable/observable user action such as, for example,downloading a white paper, navigating to at least a given depth of aWebsite, viewing at least a certain number of Web pages, spending atleast a predetermined amount of time on a Website or Web page,registering on a Website, etc. Often, if user actions don't indicate aconsummated purchase, they may indicate a sales lead, although useractions constituting a conversion are not limited to this. Indeed, manyother definitions of what constitutes a conversion are possible. Theratio of the number of conversions to the number of impressions of thead (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed or otherwise rendered)is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. If a conversion isdefined to be able to occur within a predetermined time since theserving of an ad, one possible definition of the conversion rate mightonly consider ads that have been served more than the predetermined timein the past.

Although untargeted online ads may be useful, online ads targeted to theuser (e.g., to the user's present topic of interest, to the user'slocation, to the user's demographic, etc.) generally perform better. Forexample, search engines, such as Google for example, have enabledadvertisers to target their ads so that they will be rendered inconjunction with a search results page responsive to a query that isrelevant, presumably, to the ad. Although search result pages affordadvertisers a great opportunity to target their ads to a more receptiveaudience, search result pages are merely a fraction of page views of theWorld Wide Web. To increase advertising opportunities, some onlineadvertising systems may use ad relevance information and documentcontent relevance information (e.g., concepts or topics, featurevectors, etc.) to “match” ads to (and/or to score ads with respect to) adocument including content, such as a Web page for example. (See, e.g.,U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/375,900, titled “SERVINGADVERTISEMENTS BASED ONCONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003, listing DarrellAnderson, Paul Bucheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean,Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors(incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '900application”).) The foregoing ad serving systems can be thought of askeyword-targeted systems (where ads are targeted using terms found in asearch query) and content-targeted systems (where ads are targeted usingcontent of a document).

Although keyword and content targeted ad serving, when executed well,have provided users with information relevant to a current interest andhave therefore been very effective at enticing users to visit Web pageslinked from such ads (also referred to as an “ad landing page”), thereremains a desire to improve the performance of on-line advertising.

§ 2. SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention may improve a user's Internet experience when theuser is to be presented with target content, such as content in a userrequested document for example. The present invention may do so by (i)determining additional content using the target content (or informationthereof), and (ii) presenting both the target content and the additionalcontent to the user.

Such additional information may be of interest to the user. This factmay be used to improve the performance of online ads. For example,additional content related to content that is being (or is to be)presented (e.g., shown or otherwise rendered, e.g. in a browser, texteditor, printed material, or any other content rendering application ordevice) may be generated. In some environments, the additional contentpresented can be placed within an advertisement (or near anadvertisement, or otherwise presented in association with anadvertisement). In this case, the additional content should increase thelikelihood that the user will look at (or otherwise perceive) theadvertising material (or that the advertising material will otherwiseget the user's attention), because the advertising area containsadditional kinds of relevant information—not just ads. For example, thetarget content might be an advertisement for a product, and theadditional content might be reviews or news stories about the product.

The target content may be text, a Web page, a URL, or a search query,just to name a few of the many possibilities. The additional contentmight be related suggested queries (e.g. “Try a search for ______”),news articles (or excerpts or summaries thereof), reviews (or excerptsor summaries thereof), advertisements, etc. The additional content couldbe presented in various ways or forms. For example, the additionalcontent may be presented as a suggested query, “related information,”etc. Although an excerpt or summary of the additional content may bepresented instead of the entire additional content, such an excerpt canbe considered to be “additional content” itself.

One way to generate the additional content in a manner consistent withthe present invention is to examine various sources of information anddetermine a “score” for various potential items of additional content.The sources can be a list of queries (such as a log of past queries),news articles, reviews, weather, a set of ads, etc. There are variousmethods for calculating the scores. In one embodiment, the scores can beused to help determine the relevancy of the additional content to beshown.

§ 3. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary environment in which the presentinvention may be used.

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram of an exemplary method that may be used tocombine additional content with target content in a manner consistentwith the present invention.

FIG. 3 illustrates exemplary operations of the present invention.

FIGS. 4-7 illustrates exemplary operations of the present invention inthe context of various different exemplary applications.

FIG. 8 is a block diagram of exemplary apparatus that may performvarious aspects of the present invention.

§ 4. DETAILED DESCRIPTION

The present invention may involve novel methods, apparatus, messageformats and/or data structures for increasing the usefulness of content,such as advertisements, by determining additional content and providingsuch additional content in association with the content. The followingdescription is presented to enable one skilled in the art to make anduse the invention, and is provided in the context of particularapplications and their requirements. Various modifications to thedisclosed embodiments will be apparent to those skilled in the art, andthe general principles set forth below may be applied to otherembodiments and applications. Thus, the present invention is notintended to be limited to the embodiments shown and the inventors regardtheir invention as any patentable subject matter described.

In the following, environments in which, or with which, the presentinvention may operate are described in § 4.2. Then, exemplary methods ofthe present invention are described in § 4.3. Exemplary apparatus of thepresent invention are described in § 4.4. Finally, some conclusionsregarding the present invention are set forth in § 4.5. First, however,certain terms used are defined in § 4.1.

§ 4.1 Definitions

Online ads, such as those used in the keyword-targeted orcontent-targeted ad serving systems like those introduced in § 1.2above, or any other system, may have various intrinsic features. Suchfeatures may be specified by an application and/or an advertiser. Thesefeatures are referred to as “ad features” below. For example, in thecase of a text ad, ad features may include a title line, ad text, and anembedded link. In the case of an image ad, ad features may includeimages, executable code, and an embedded link. Depending on the type ofonline ad, ad features may include one or more of the following: text, alink, an audio file, a video file, an image file, executable code,embedded information, etc.

When an online ad is served, one or more parameters may be used todescribe how, when, and/or where the ad was served. These parameters arereferred to as “serving parameters” below. Serving parameters mayinclude, for example, one or more of the following: features of(including information on) a page on which the ad was served, a searchquery or search results associated with the serving of the ad, a usercharacteristic (e.g., their geolocation, the language used by the user,the type of browser used, previous page views, previous behavior), ahost or affiliate site (e.g., America Online, Google, Yahoo) thatinitiated the request, an absolute position of the ad on the page onwhich it was served, a position (spatial or temporal) of the ad relativeto other ads served, an absolute size of the ad, a size of the adrelative to other ads, a color of the ad, a number of other ads served,types of other ads served, time of day served, time of week served, timeof year served, etc. Naturally, there are other serving parameters thatmay be used in the context of the invention.

Although serving parameters may be extrinsic to ad features, they may beassociated with an ad as serving conditions or constraints. When used asserving conditions or constraints, such serving parameters are referredto simply as “serving constraints” (or “targeting criteria”). Forexample, in some systems, an advertiser may be able to target theserving of its ad by specifying that it is only to be served onweekdays, no lower than a certain position, only to users in a certaingeolocation, etc. “Geolocation information” may include informationspecifying one or more of one or more countries, one or more(inter-country) regions, one or more states, one or more metro areas,one or more cities, one or more towns, one or more boroughs, one or moreareas with common zip codes, one or more areas with common telephonearea codes, one or more areas served by common cable head end stations,one or more areas served by common network access points or nodes, etc.It may include latitude and/or longitude, or a range thereof. It mayinclude information, such as an IP address, from which a user locationcan be estimated. As another example, in some systems, an advertiser mayspecify that its ad is to be served only if a page or search queryincludes certain keywords or phrases. As yet another example, in somesystems, an advertiser may specify that its ad is to be served only if adocument being served includes certain topics or concepts, or fallsunder a particular cluster or clusters, or some other classification orclassifications.

“Ad information” may include any combination of ad features, ad servingconstraints, information derivable from ad features or ad servingconstraints (referred to as “ad derived information”), and/orinformation related to the ad (referred to as “ad related information”),as well as an extension of such information (e.g., information derivedfrom ad related information).

A “document” is to be broadly interpreted to include anymachine-readable and machine-storable work product. A document may be afile, a combination of files, one or more files with embedded links toother files, etc. The files may be of any type, such as text, audio,image, video, etc. Parts of a document to be rendered to an end user canbe thought of as “content” of the document. A document may include“structured data” containing both content (words, pictures, etc.) andsome indication of the meaning of that content (for example, e-mailfields and associated data, HTML tags and associated data, etc.) Adspots in the document may be defined by embedded information orinstructions. In the context of the Internet, a common document is a Webpage. Web pages often include content and may include embeddedinformation (such as meta information, hyperlinks, etc.) and/or embeddedinstructions (such asJavascript, etc.). In many cases, a document has aunique, addressable, storage location and can therefore be uniquelyidentified by this addressable location. A universal resource locator(URL) is a unique address used to access information on the Internet.

“Document information” may include any information included in thedocument, information derivable from information included in thedocument (referred to as “document derived information”), and/orinformation related to the document (referred to as “document relatedinformation”), as well as an extensions of such information (e.g.,information derived from related information). An example of documentderived information is a classification based on textual content of adocument. Examples of document related information include documentinformation from other documents with links to the instant document, aswell as document information from other documents to which the instantdocument links.

Content from a document may be rendered on a “content renderingapplication or device”. Examples of content rendering applicationsinclude an Internet browser (e.g., Explorer or Netscape), a media player(e.g., an MP3 player, a Realnetworks streaming audio file player, etc.),a viewer (e.g., an Abobe Acrobat pdf reader), etc.

A “content owner” is a person or entity that has some property right inthe content of a document. A content owner may be an author of thecontent. In addition, or alternatively, a content owner may have rightsto reproduce the content, rights to prepare derivative works of thecontent, rights to display or perform the content publicly, and/or otherproscribed rights in the content. Although a content server might be acontent owner in the content of the documents it serves, this is notnecessary.

“User information” may include user behavior information and/or userprofile information.

“E-mail information” may include any information included in an e-mail(also referred to as “internal e-mail information”), informationderivable from information included in the e-mail and/or informationrelated to the e-mail, as well as extensions of such information (e.g.,information derived from related information). An example of informationderived from e-mail information is information extracted or otherwisederived from search results returned in response to a search querycomposed of terms extracted from an e-mailsubject line. Examples ofinformation related to e-mail information include e-mail informationabout one or more other e-mails sent by the same sender of a givene-mail, or user information about an e-mail recipient. Informationderived from or related to e-mail information may be referred to as“external e-mail information.”

Various exemplary embodiments of the present invention are nowdescribed. First, however, exemplary environments in which, or withwhich the present invention may be used are introduced in § 4.2.

§ 4.2 Exemplary Environments in which, or with which the PresentInvention May be Used

FIG. 1 illustrates an environment 100 in which the present invention maybe used. A user device (also referred to as a “client” or “clientdevice”) 150 may include a browser facility (such as the Explorerbrowser from Microsoft, the Opera Web Browser from Opera Software ofNorway, the Navigator browser from AOL/Time Warner, etc.), an e-mailfacility (e.g., Outlook from Microsoft), or any other softwareapplication or hardware device used to render content, etc. A searchengine 120 may permit user devices 150 to search collections ofdocuments (e.g., Web pages). A content server 130 may permit userdevices 150 to access documents. An e-mail server (such as Hotmail fromMicrosoft Network, Yahoo Mail, etc.) 140 may be used to provide e-mailfunctionality to user devices 150. An ad server 110 may be used to serveads to user devices 150. The ads may be served in association with (i)search results provided by the search engine 120. Content-relevant adsmay be served in association with content provided by the content server130, and/or e-mail supported by the e-mail server 140 and/or user devicee-mail facilities. The various servers can store “other information”.For example, content servers 130 can store news stories, reviews, usergroup messages, etc. Search engines 120 can store search queries, etc.

As discussed in the '900 application, ads may be targeted to documentsserved by content servers. Thus, one example of an ad consumer is ageneral content server 130 that receives requests for documents (e.g.,articles, discussion threads, music, video, graphics, search results,Web page listings, etc.), and retrieves the requested document inresponse to, or otherwise services, the request. The content server 130may submit a request for ads to the ad server 110. Such an ad requestmay include a number of ads desired. The ad request may also includedocument request information. This information may include the documentitself (e.g., page), a category or topic corresponding to the content ofthe document or the document request (e.g., arts, business, computers,arts-movies, arts-music, etc.), part or all of the document request,content age, content type (e.g., text, graphics, video, audio, mixedmedia, etc.), geolocation information, end user local time information,document information, etc.

The content server 130 may combine the requested document with one ormore of the advertisements provided by the ad server 110. This combinedinformation including the document content and advertisement(s) is thenforwarded towards the end user device 150 that requested the document,for presentation to the user. Finally, the content server 130 maytransmit information about the ads and how, when, and/or where the adsare to be rendered (e.g., position, click-through or not, impressiontime, impression date, size, conversion or not, etc.) back to the adserver 110. Alternatively, or in addition, such information may beprovided back to the ad server 110 by some other means. Consistent withthe present invention, the ad server 110 may store ad performanceinformation.

Another example of an ad consumer is the search engine 120. A searchengine 120 may receive queries for search results. In response, thesearch engine may retrieve relevant search results (e.g., from an indexof Web pages). An exemplary search engine is described in the article S.Brin and L. Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual SearchEngine,” Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane,Australia and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999 (both incorporated herein byreference). Such search results may include, for example, lists of Webpage titles, snippets of text extracted from those Web pages, andhypertext links to those Web pages, and may be grouped into apredetermined number of (e.g., ten) search results.

The search engine 120 may submit a request for ads to the ad server 110.The request may include a number of ads desired. This number may dependon the search results, the amount of screen or page space occupied bythe search results, the size and shape of the ads, etc. In oneembodiment, the number of desired ads will be from one to ten, andpreferably from three to five. The request for ads may also include thequery (as entered or parsed), information based on the query (such asend user local time information, geolocation information, whether thequery came from an affiliate and an identifier of such an affiliate),and/or information associated with, or based on, the search results.Such information may include, for example, identifiers related to thesearch results (e.g., document identifiers or “docIDs”), scores relatedto the search results (e.g., information retrieval (“IR”) scores such asdot products of feature vectors corresponding to a query and a document,Page Rank scores, and/or combinations of IR scores and Page Rankscores), snippets of text extracted from identified documents (e.g., Webpages), full text of identified documents, topics of identifieddocuments, feature vectors of identified documents, etc.

The search engine 120 may combine the search results with one or more ofthe advertisements provided by the ad server 110. This combinedinformation including the search results and advertisement(s) is thenforwarded towards the user that submitted the search, for presentationto the user. Preferably, the search results are maintained as distinctfrom the ads, so as not to confuse the user between paid advertisementsand presumably neutral search results.

Finally, the search engine 120 may transmit information about the ad andwhen, where, and/or how the ad was to be rendered (e.g., position,click-through or not, impression time, impression date, size, conversionor not, etc.) back to the ad server 110. Alternatively, or in addition,such information may be provided back to the ad server 110 by some othermeans.

Finally, the e-mail server 140 may be thought of, generally, as acontent server in which a document served is simply an e-mail. Further,e-mail applications (such as Microsoft Outlook for example) may be usedto send and/or receive e-mail. Therefore, an e-mail server 140 orapplication may be thought of as an ad consumer. Thus, e-mails may bethought of as documents, and targeted ads may be served in associationwith such documents. For example, one or more ads may be served in,under, over, or otherwise in association with an e-mail.

Although the foregoing examples described servers as (i) requesting ads,and (ii) combining them with content, one or both of these operationsmay be performed by a client device (such as an end user computer forexample).

The present invention may be carried out, at least in part, on contentmixing server 160. Alternatively, various aspects of the presentinvention may be performed on one or more of the ad server 110, searchengine 120, content server 130, e-mail server 140, user device 150, andcontent mixing server 160.

§ 4.3 Exemplary Methods

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram of an exemplary method 200 that may be used tocombine additional content with target content in a manner consistentwith the present invention. As shown, target content (e.g., content tobe presented to a user), or information thereof (e.g., a URL of aWebpage), is accepted. (Block 210) Additional content is generated oridentified using the target content or the information thereof. (Block220) Note that the additional content may be advertisements, though itneed not be. Recall that the additional content may be determined froman information source which may include news stories, product reviews,service reviews, search queries, etc. Ads may be obtained (e.g.,requested and/or served) using the additional content. (Block 230) Thetarget content may then be combined (e.g., spatially in window, onseparate windows, temporally, etc.) with at least one of (a) adstargeted to the target content, (b) ads targeted to the additionalcontent, and (c) the additional content (Block 240) before the method200 is left (Node 250).

Referring back to block 220, one way to generate the additional contentin a manner consistent with the present invention is to examine varioussources of information and determine a “score” for the various potentialitems of additional content. The sources can be a list of queries (suchas a log of past queries), news articles, reviews, weather, a set ofads, etc. There are various methods of determining scores for eachsource of information. In certain embodiments of the present invention,the methods will have the basic scheme of extracting features (terms,concepts, categories, etc.) from each item in the information sources aswell as the content of the page, and may involve using informationretrieval techniques known to those of skill in the art to assign scoresusing a match between the information item's features and those of thetarget content (Web page).

In one embodiment, the scores can be used to help determine therelevancy of advertisements to be shown. For example, given a targetcontent Web page about theme parks, sources might be examined and acurrent news story “Disney to Open Theme Park in Beijing Next Week” maybe determined to be a high scoring additional content item. Based onthis (high score) additional content item, an ad “Buy Tickets toBeijing” might be targeted to the Web page. Of course, the target Webpage could also be used, and an ad for “Buy a book ‘The Best ThemeParks”’ could be targeted. Indeed, both can be used to target an ad “Buythe book ‘Theme Parks in China’”. Accordingly, additional content can beselected and used as further target content. Further additional contentmay then be selected using the further target content. This may beexpressed by the following:

additional_content_0=f{target_content_0};

target_content_1=target_content_0+additional_content_0;

additional_content_1=f{target_content_1).

FIG. 3 illustrates an exemplary performance of the exemplary method 200of the present invention. Additional content 320 is generated fromtarget content 310 using information source(s) 330. One or more ads 340relevant to the target content 310 and/or the additional content 320 maybe generated. The target content 352, additional content 354 andcontent-relevant ad(s) 356 may be combined 350 for presentation to auser. For example, the combined information 350 may be spatiallycombined information on a Web page to be rendered to a user. As anotherexample, the combined information 350 may be temporally combinedinformation on an audio program to be rendered to a user. As yet anotherexample, the combined information 350 may be spatially and/or temporallycombined information on a video program to be rendered to a user.

Various exemplary applications of the present invention are nowdescribed with reference to FIGS. 4-7. Naturally, other applications ofthe present invention are possible, many of which will be apparent tothose skilled in the art. The present invention is not limited to thefollowing examples.

Example 1

FIG. 4 illustrates a first exemplary application of the presentinvention. Given a Web page or its URL (the target content) 410,advertisements (the additional content) 420 relevant to the web page/URLare generated using information sources 430. ‘Exemplary techniques forperforming such content-relevant ad serving are described in the '900application. For example, a content-relevant ad server may use targetinginformation 430 associated with the ads. Combined information 450 to bepresented to a user includes the target content 452 and one or morecontent-relevant ads 454.

Example 2

FIG. 5 illustrates a second exemplary application of the presentinvention. Given one or more advertisements (the target content) 510 forone or more product or service, one or more reviews about the product orservice advertised, or a summary or excerpt of such review(s) (theadditional content) 520 is generated from additional information 530(e.g., editorial reviews, customer reviews, etc.). The combinedinformation 550 to be presented to a user includes the ads 556 and theadditional content 554. News stories, or a summary or excerpt of suchstories, may be provided instead of, or in addition to, the reviews.

Note that the combined information 550 may include other content 552such as that of a Web page 515 for example. Note that in one embodiment,the additional content may be selected and/or filtered to enhance theadvertising message. For example, in one embodiment of the presentinvention, only additional content product review information includingthe phrase “top rated” or “best” are considered.

Example 3

FIG. 6 illustrates a third exemplary application of the presentinvention. Given a Web page and one or more advertisements on the page(target content) 610, suggestions 620 on where and/or how to findadditional information may be determined (e.g., “Interested in [howsemiconductors work]? Visit {IBM's Materials Science page}, or{www.howstuffworks.com}, or query Google for {amorphoussemiconductor/thin film devices/uhv cvd/ . . . }) may be determined frominformation sources 330. The combined information 650 to be presented toa user includes the Web page content and ads 652 and the additionalcontent 654. In this example, the additional content 620 may be one ormore search results from a search query generated from the targetcontent. As this example illustrates, the target content 610 can havemultiple components.

Example 4

FIG. 7 illustrates a fourth exemplary application of the presentinvention. Text and/or a URL of a Web page is provided as the targetcontent 710. Relevant information (e.g., related news, queries, reviews,etc.) 720 is generated using the target content 710 and otherinformation sources 730. The other information sources 730 may includeone or more of a list of queries, a set of current news articles,reviews of products and/or services, weather information, a set ofadvertisements, etc. The various items from the information sources 730are each assigned a score based on how well it matches the contents ofthe Web page 710. The best scoring items 720 may be returned, inconjunction with the best scoring ads 740. The combined information 750to be presented to a user includes the Web page content 752, theadditional content 754, and the ads 756. The additional content may beprovided in association with the ad(s) (e.g., placed within the ad,placed next to the ad, etc.) thus increasing the likelihood that the adswill be noticed. An example of the kind of information that might scorehigh for a given Web page is provided below.

For the Web pagehttp://www.research.ibm.com/disciplines/materials_science.shtml (IBMResearch's Materials Science home page), the following queries may beidentified as relevant using the contents of this page:

Query Google for:

# amorphous semiconductor

# thin film devices

# uhv cvd

# silicon technology

# amorphous materials

# semiconductor device simulation

This could be paired with advertisements such as:

Semiconductor Link Page

More than 1000 links to IC and

equipment manufacturers & News.

www.boin-gmbh.com/linkpagellinkpage

Low Yield Problem?

Finding why isn't always easy.

QYield can help. Click for details.

www.quadrillion.com

News stories can also be selected. For this page, the following newsstories might be selected:

Chip oversupply expected to linger in '04—Electronic Buyers News

Chartered outlines new strategy, plans fab in China—EE Times Online

Referring to the short dashed arc in FIG. 7, in an alternativeembodiment, the best scoring items can be used to help determinerelevant ads. For example, given a Web page 710 about theme parks, anews item 720 from “current news” information sources 730 with aheadline such as “Disney to Open Theme Park in Beijing Next Week” may beselected. The information selected 720 may be used to help targetadvertisements 740 to both the selected information and the content ofthe page:

‘Buy Tickets to Beijing’

‘Buy the book “Theme Parks in China”’

As the foregoing example illustrates, information from (a) the targetcontent, (b) the additional content, or (c) both can be used todetermine content-relevant ads.

§ 4.4 Exemplary Apparatus

FIG. 8 is high-level block diagram of a machine 800 that may perform oneor more of the operations discussed above. The machine 800 basicallyincludes one or more processors 810, one or more input/output interfaceunits 830, one or more storage devices 820, and one or more system busesand/or networks 840 for facilitating the communication of informationamong the coupled elements. One or more input devices 832 and one ormore output devices 834 may be coupled with the one or more input/outputinterfaces 830.

The one or more processors 810 may execute machine-executableinstructions (e.g., C or C++ running on the Solaris operating systemavailable from Sun Microsystems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. or the Linuxoperating system widely available from a number of vendors such as RedHat, Inc. of Durham, N.C.) to effect one or more aspects of the presentinvention. At least a portion of the machine executable instructions maybe stored (temporarily or more permanently) on the one or more storagedevices 820 and/or may be received from an external source via one ormore input interface units 830.

In one embodiment, the machine 800 may be one or more conventionalpersonal computers. In this case, the processing units 810 may be one ormore microprocessors. The bus 840 may include a system bus. The storagedevices 820 may include system memory, such as read only memory (ROM)and/or random access memory (RAM). The storage devices 820 may alsoinclude a hard disk drive for reading from and writing to a hard disk, amagnetic disk drive for reading from or writing to a (e.g., removable)magnetic disk, and an optical disk drive for reading from or writing toa removable (magneto-) optical disk such as a compact disk or other(magneto-) optical media.

A user may enter commands and information into the personal computerthrough input devices 832, such as a keyboard and pointing device (e.g.,a mouse) for example. Other input devices such as a microphone, ajoystick, a game pad, a satellite dish, a scanner, or the like, may also(or alternatively) be included. These and other input devices are oftenconnected to the processing unit(s) 810 through an appropriate interface830 coupled to the system bus 840. The output devices 834 may include amonitor or other type of display device, which may also be connected tothe system bus 840 via an appropriate interface. In addition to (orinstead of) the monitor, the personal computer may include other(peripheral) output devices (not shown), such as speakers and printersfor example.

Referring to FIG. 1, one or more of the ad server 110, the search engine120, the content server 130, the e-mail server 140, the user device 150and the content mixing server 160 can be machines, such as the machine800.

§ 4.5 Conclusions

As can be appreciated from the foregoing, the present inventionincreases the usefulness of content, such as advertisements, bydetermining additional content and providing such additional content inassociation with the content.

1-16. (canceled)
 17. A computer-implemented method, comprising:selecting, by one or more computing devices, a content item to provideto the user computing device to display with an electronic document;generating, by the one or more computing devices, additional contentbased on information about an item from the content item; inserting, bythe one or more computing devices, the generated additional content intothe content item; and providing, by the one or more computing devices,the content item that includes the generated additional content inconjunction with the electronic document.
 18. The computer implementedmethod of claim 17, further comprising determining a location of theuser computing device, wherein generating the additional content based,at least in part, on the location of the user computing device.
 19. Thecomputer-implemented method of claim 18, wherein determining a locationof the user computing device comprises determining a country location ofthe user computing device, the method further comprising determiningthat a provider of the content item has identified the content item forserving to users in the country location of the user computing device.20. The computer-implemented method of claim 19, wherein selecting thecontent item comprises selecting the content item based on thedetermination that the provider of the content item has identified thecontent item for serving to users in the country location of the usercomputing device.
 21. The computer-implemented method of claim 17,wherein providing the content item comprises providing an audio outputrendered to the user.
 22. The computer-implemented method of claim 17,wherein inserting the generated additional content into the content itemcomprises inserting an excerpt of available information about the itemfrom the content item.
 23. The computer-implemented method of claim 17,wherein inserting the generated additional content into the content itemcomprises inserting a summary of information collected about the itemfrom the content item.
 24. A non-transitory computer readable mediumstoring instructions that, when executed by one or more computingdevices, cause the one or more computing devices to perform operationscomprising: selecting a content item to provide to the user computingdevice to display with an electronic document; generating additionalcontent based on information about an item from the content item;inserting the generated additional content into the content item; andproviding the content item that includes the generated additionalcontent in conjunction with the electronic document.
 25. Thenon-transitory computer readable medium of claim 24, wherein theinstructions cause the one or more computing devices to performoperations further comprising determining a location of the usercomputing device, wherein generating the additional content based, atleast in part, on the location of the user computing device.
 26. Thenon-transitory computer readable medium of claim 25, wherein:determining a location of the user computing device comprisesdetermining a country location of the user computing device; and theinstructions cause the one or more computing devices to performoperations further comprising determining that a provider of the contentitem has identified the content item for serving to users in the countrylocation of the user computing device.
 27. The non-transitory computerreadable medium of claim 26, wherein selecting the content itemcomprises selecting the content item based on the determination that theprovider of the content item has identified the content item for servingto users in the country location of the user computing device.
 28. Thenon-transitory computer readable medium of claim 24, wherein providingthe content item comprises providing an audio output rendered to theuser.
 29. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 24,wherein inserting the generated additional content into the content itemcomprises inserting an excerpt of available information about the itemfrom the content item.
 30. The non-transitory computer readable mediumof claim 24, wherein inserting the generated additional content into thecontent item comprises inserting a summary of information collectedabout the item from the content item.
 31. A system, comprising: astorage device; and one or more processors communicatively coupled tothe storage device, wherein the processor executes application codeinstructions that are stored in the storage device, and execution of theapplication code instructions cause the one or more processors toperform operations comprising: selecting a content item to provide tothe user computing device to display with an electronic document;generating additional content based on information about an item fromthe content item; inserting the generated additional content into thecontent item; and providing the content item that includes the generatedadditional content in conjunction with the electronic document.
 32. Thesystem of claim 31, wherein the application code instructions cause theone or more processors to perform operations further comprisingdetermining a location of the user computing device, wherein generatingthe additional content based, at least in part, on the location of theuser computing device.
 33. The system of claim 32, wherein: determininga location of the user computing device comprises determining a countrylocation of the user computing device; and the application codeinstructions cause the one or more processors to perform operationsfurther comprising determining that a provider of the content item hasidentified the content item for serving to users in the country locationof the user computing device.
 34. The system of claim 33, whereinselecting the content item comprises selecting the content item based onthe determination that the provider of the content item has identifiedthe content item for serving to users in the country location of theuser computing device.
 35. The system of claim 31, wherein providing thecontent item comprises providing an audio output rendered to the user.36. The system of claim 31, wherein inserting the generated additionalcontent into the content item comprises inserting an excerpt ofavailable information about the item from the content item.
 37. Thesystem of claim 31, wherein inserting the generated additional contentinto the content item comprises inserting a summary of informationcollected about the item from the content item.
 38. The system of claim17, wherein the additional content overlays a portion of the contentitem.